


The Intelligence Catastrophe

by PrairieDawn



Series: The Intelligence Catastrophe [3]
Category: Star Trek
Genre: A whole lot of stuff you didn't want to know about microbes, But I promise nothing about midichlorians, Fake Nonfiction, Gen, Infodumping, Me being salty about evolution, Stuff about aerobic respiration, Stuff about telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 02:23:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13424706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: In-universe article about how noncorporeality emerges in intelligent species.  Pretty much an evolutionary biologist (me) being salty about misuse of the term "evolution" while engaging in copious infodumping and made-up physics.Also the entire first half is about the oxygen catastrophe, which is a real thing and pretty interesting if you're a microbiologist.





	The Intelligence Catastrophe

**Author's Note:**

> A warning: This is a lot more user friendly than it was four drafts ago, but it still reads like something your college biology teacher would make you read and write a report on.

By Tamara Gossett

There is a biological mystery underway in the galaxy. Individual people, sometimes whole species are disappearing, changing into beings that have no need of organic bodies to continue their existence. The phenomenon is rare at this point, unpredictable and in general irreversible. Some people have erroneously described this process as evolutionary, as beings evolving beyond the need for physical bodies, but using the term evolution in this way is a misnomer. Evolution just doesn’t work that way--not without some physical phenomenon to push it. In this case, life forms evaporating into puffs of thought is the universe’s endgame in its attempt to turn living beings into tools with which is can know itself.

To explain this situation, and to get a handle on the most likely cause, we have to understand what evolution is, what it can and cannot do by itself, and how physics and chemistry provide evolution with not just the tools to build complicated life forms like us, but also with problems for living things to solve. To do that, we will take apart evolution’s responses to another crisis common to most humanoid living things, one brought about by our need to respond to a metabolic waste product, oxygen.

So, first, a little background on evolution. Evolution is a name we give the process by which anything that can make imperfect copies of itself changes over time to make more and better copies. Organic life forms evolve. Most inorganic life forms also evolve. Some forms of self perpetuating data evolve, including memes, data viruses, and those noncorporeals that are still in the business of making babies. Evolution has no goal. It has no template for an ideal being, no desires, no plans at all. It nothing more that the result of a simple mathematical rule. If a copy making system makes lots of copies that survive, there will be more copies of that system around. Unless you are an intelligently designed construct (hi Data), you are exactly as evolved as a bacterium, because both you and the bacterium are the product of countless generations of war against time and death.

Copy making systems (like living beings) last longer and become more common if the copies they make are able to persist and make more copies, to throw the image of themselves forward into the future so as not to be lost to entropy and death. That’s it. Evolution’s strategy, to the extent that it has one at all, is to make a lot of copies, try something new every now and then by making imperfect copies, and have some of those imperfect copies be as good at persisting and making copies than the original was--or at least, as good at surviving in some environment in which the new, imperfect copies find themselves. All the complexity of life in the universe is produced by copy making systems bumping up against physics, chemistry, and each other and jostling around their characteristics until they find a place to fit. So what does this have to do with the crises of oxygen and intelligence? Everything. 

Oxygen is the breath of life. Without it complex, multicellular organic life stalls at algae mats and filter feeders. Life needs a lot of energy to become complex, and it gets that energy out of organic molecules through a complex process we’re not going to detail here because I won’t stoop to that level of sadism, but that relies on oxygen as a molecular sink for electrons. Without that powerful sink, organisms can turn much less energy from the chemical bonds in organic molecules into forms that can be used to do all the metabolic jobs that keep us alive.

However, oxygen gets its power by craving electrons. It hungers for electrons in a predatory kind of way that causes it to rip the electrons off of the organic molecules it encounters. Oxygen is so electron hungry, so ready to attack and combine with other atoms to obtain their electrons that free oxygen does not exist on planets without living things to continuously replenish the supply. Life emerges first on worlds that are devoid of oxygen and first learns to build its bodies and process energy in its absence. But the several easiest ways to build organic molecules using light energy make oxygen as a waste product. That oxygen builds up in the atmosphere, killing the very organisms that released it in the first place. It is at that point that solutions begin to evolve.

This is a good point to stop and remember that the engine of evolution is death. Selection pressure means that the environment has characteristics that are trying to kill you. Competition, predators, heat and cold and toxic waste, these pressures are going to make you dead unless you’re good at working around them. The organisms around at the time of the oxygen catastrophe weren’t good at dealing with oxygen. Most of them just died. But a few of them happened to have something in their biological toolkit that gave them a chance to persist.

There were three big strategies the survivors put to use. Escaping oxygen, learning to tolerate oxygen, and eventually, learning to cage it and put it to use. Some microorganisms use the first strategy. They remain in those environments that still exist that lack oxygen, which at the microscopic level are more common that you might think. They’re in the guts of most humanoids, in wet soils and bogs, deep in bodies of water, even between the teeth of those of us who have teeth. Some microbes learn to put up with oxygen. They build enzymes and antioxidant molecules that react with oxygen and turn it into less harmful forms, but they don’t make use of oxygen’s power. Both of those strategies, hiding from oxygen and detoxifying oxygen don’t lead to big changes in the way life works. Living things that use those strategies, with a few exceptions, stay small and simple.

Some organisms learned to do an amazing new trick with oxygen; aerobic respiration. They built complex chemical cages to collect oxygen, carry it to their metabolic factories, and use its power to efficiently break large, energy rich molecules into pieces and store every last bit of the energy released in usable forms. Their innovation gave them the energy to get bigger, more active, and more complicated, to work together in increasingly complex arrangements (what we call multicellular organisms), and eventually grow complicated enough to make microscopes and starships. Without the chemistry of oxygen, none of that could happen. 

So, life solves the oxygen crisis. There is considerable evidence it did so more than once, but on fewer worlds than the number of worlds that are found to contain complex life. Between the effects of interstellar bolide hitchhiking and the fungal superhighway, good solutions to hard problems get around. By now, we have more than just a basic few relationships with oxygen. In the microbial world, there are organisms that die in the presence of oxygen immediately, organisms that tolerate oxygen’s presence but don’t grow as well with it, and organisms that completely ignore oxygen because their biological systems efficiently shuttle it away. On the other end, there are organisms that need oxygen, that cannot survive without it--that would be almost everyone reading this essay. 

I’m sure you’re probably wondering what this has to do with species of perfectly respectable humanoids converting into energy beings. It’s a long story, and an analogy, so bear with me. Without going into too much detail, there are six major forces that hold the universe together. The first two, gravity and the slip force, which is involved in warp fields and the connections between different layers of space, split off first in the first few instants of creation, to reside on their own layers of subspace, followed shortly thereafter by the strong force, then electromagnetism and the weak force. At this point the universe was singular, but undefined. It consisted of uncollapsed probability waveforms. When the first wave of intelligences emerged in the early universe, roughly ten thousand years after the big bang, quantum observer bias decoupled from the fabric of the universe, collapsing probability waves and producing stacks of parallel universes. We can still see the epitaphs of these earliest thinking beings written into the large scale structure of the universe.

Since then, the universe exercises what might be described as an insatiable drive to become more real. We could anthropomorphize and say that the universe wants to become more real and we might not even be wrong. There is compelling evidence, though not unequivocal proof, that the universe itself is intelligent in some fashion. In any case, the fabric of the universe at its most basic level is made of collapsed and uncollapsed waves of probability. As events are observed by beings with even the rudiments of intelligence, those waveforms solidify into a number of parallel universes whose total entropy is somewhat higher than the uncollapsed waveforms. The more each universe is observed, and the more those observations agree with each other, the more complete each universe becomes. 

Intelligent beings complete the universe by communicating their reality with one another. Esper functions, dominated by telepathy and propagating through subspace, are driven by the physics of quantum observer bias and are a sort of brute force attempt by the universe to entrain the perceptions of living beings into agreement with each other. The development of language and culture, which allows knowledge to be transmitted not only among individuals, but also down the time stream serves the same function somewhat more elegantly.

The forces in the universe that produce reality, therefore, cause intelligence to gradually increase in frequency throughout the universe. Intelligence influences and responds to a particular class of tetryon particle, the r-neutrino, in ways that communicate information between intelligent beings, resulting in esper phenomena, including telepathy and the secondary esper phenomena that piggyback on telepathic carrier waves. When intelligence begins to emerge in a species, at about the level of intelligence as possessed by, for example, an Earth cat, the brain begins to be influenced by r-neutrinos. With species of more limited processing power, these interactions are fairly weak, and what information they provide to the individual is limited, but often useful in that it can provide insight into the location of prey and the intentions of potential rivals or mates. It is frequently sufficient to produce the beginnings of processing structures on the brains of life forms, usually superimposed on the networks used to process earlier to emerge senses, like sight and hearing.

However, as organisms become capable of higher reasoning, they interact more strongly with r-neutrinos, and that interaction begins to cause problems. This tends to happen within relatively few generations. R-neutrinos interact with established processing patterns and, rather than integrating effectively with them, overwhelm the brain’s processing capacity and interfere with sensory processing while also demanding significant additional amounts of metabolic energy. As a result, becoming intelligent enough to interact effectively with r-neutrino fields is grossly maladaptive.

At this point, intelligent beings find themselves at a crossroads similar to that faced by the tiny microorganisms being fried by their own oxygen waste--in a sense, their psionic fields are a toxic waste product of their intelligence. This, by the way, happens relatively early in the development of intelligence, at roughly the levels seen in nonhuman higher primates, such as chimpanzees. Different species move down different evolutionary pathways at this point.

Some species go the avoidance route and simply don’t get any smarter. This is probably the reason why so many worlds have so many almost, but not quite sapient species. On Earth, Some block, sequester, or shunt the data received. Most humanoids, including humans, have a shunt mechanism that allows all signal below a certain threshold to dissipate, but does allow for the synesthetic processing of strong signals that overwhelm the shunt’s capacity. It practical terms, most humanoid species are unable to consciously access telepathic informaiton on their own, but are able to perceive and interact with stronger signals produced by telepathic individuals.

Psi capable species frequently refer to those species with sequestering mechanisms as psi-null, but given that for most species the shunt leaks small amounts of signal and can be overtopped by strong stimuli, the term is misleading. Most trophic physicists prefer the term psi-latent. A few species, most notably the Ferengi, have developed powerful block and channel systems that actively destroy r-neutrino signals as they reach the brain. These few species might legitimately be described as psi-null.

Latency appears and persists in response to several negative selection pressures on esper ability. The first is simply that the ability interferes with other senses. Visions and vestibular effects interfere with moving around, auditory interference makes it more difficult to hear threats. Sensory miscalibrations interfere with cognitive development in childhood, resulting in children who do not grow up to find mates and have children of their own. The second issue is energy. For most species, the advent of agriculture results in boom and bust cycles that lead to repeated famines. Psi-sensitives use up to 50% more calories than psi-latents of the same species. In a famine, they tend to be the first to die. Finally, esper capacity rarely emerges all at once, but tends to appear first in a few scattered individuals. Preindustrial cultures tend to respond to these individuals at best by placing them in a nonbreeding priest or shaman class, and at worst by burning them at the stake. Humans only grew out of murdering espers about a hundred years ago, with the most recent large scale genocide occurring in the 2050’s--a genocide aided by genetic analyses that made it extraordinarily thorough. A note: While the eugenically motivated killings at Tarsus 4 did target espers among those slated for murder, there were only four documented individuals in that category, one of whom survived.

In cultures which have solved the problems of genocide, famine, and the integration of neurodivergent people into society generally, the rate of esper function in the population steadily increases. Given the rate of increase, humans, for example, can expect the vast majority of the population to be functionally psi-sensitive in five to seven hundred years. (if we had not systematically exterminated espers and potential espers in the mid twenty-first century, we would be looking at that conversion occurring about now.)  
About one in five sapient species become majority psi-sensitive prior to developing spacefaring civilizations. In general, species with the most well developed abilities went through a long period of time of very low population density, either because of limited planetary resources (the Themm, who live on highly volcanically active, arid plateaus), population bottlenecks (Betazoids, who appear to have been descended from fewer than three hundred Preserver transplants some twelve thousand years ago), or a combination of both, (Vulcans, who did a very good job of almost wiping themselves out at least twice in the pre-Reformation era).

The majority of Federation members are in the same transitional state as humans, with a small, but gradually increasing percentage of psi-sensitives in the population. Since its founding, for example, the number of human psi-sensitives has increased from roughly one in ten thousand to one in a hundred, though the majority of those do not culturally identify as such and usually only discover their status if circumstances (Starfleet enlistment, for example) require them to be tested.   
Once a species is functionally psi-sensitive, the universe favors circumstances that prevent the loss of its members to death, with or without the cooperation of the local culture. The first noncorporeal descendents of organic life forms generally begin life as organic corporeals and become stable energy fields supported by naturally or artificially created matrices when the organic body dies. 

In some cases, this process appears to have been accelerated, causing living beings to spontaneously dissolve their organic bodies to become noncorporeal. We do not yet know what triggers this process, nor do we know for certain whether it is the inevitable fate of all organic species. Most species persist for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years without disapparating. Living species probably evolve biological mechanisms which attempt to stall the process, at least until after childbearing age, while quantum bias effects make maintaining physical bodies more and more difficult. What we suspect for the far future is that the universe is tending toward a state in which it is heavily populated with noncorporeal connected observers who can efficiently collapse quantum waveforms and render the universe fully known. Some trophic physicists speculate that this end state leads to the intentional creation of a child universe by a universal mind, and that this cycle may have occurred multiple times.  
So, the universe is alive and is becoming smarter all the time, with living beings functioning as something like individual neurons in its embryonic brain. The structure of the universe doesn’t waste knowledge--there’s a good chance that all of us are preserved in some form to become part of that whole. Given that’s likely to be the case, the kind of people we are has a profound effect on the kind of being the universe becomes. That seems to be as good a reason as any to try to build the best world we can for each other right now.

**Author's Note:**

> Please, if you got all the way to the end, say something. Ask a question. Roll your eyes. Argue.


End file.
